Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an author. She came to writing late in life, but the book she published became a bestseller and was made into a television series.

Called the past is myself, it tells the story of how she a well-born English woman married

a German lawyer and went to live in Berlin as Hitler came to power. They and their

friends watched with horror the rise of National Socialism and suffered at the hands of the Third Reich.

Now 83, she's lived for the past 43 years with her husband and children in Ireland, the story of which forms the basis of her

latest book. She is Christabel Beelenburg. You wrote your first book

Christabelle when you were nearly 60 and your second when you were 80 do you actually enjoy

writing or did you almost write out of a sense of duty that yours was a story that

had to be told? No if I'm to be honest, I wrote out of a sense of duty. I knew there was a missing book, and that was a book which told

that there were other Germans besides those that were flapping their arms and Heil-Hittling all over the place.

And when I arrived back in England, I realized there was very few people who realized, who understood that there was another Germany and frankly I felt it was my duty to do

something about it if I could. I read every German newspaper from 1933 onwards because there were certain questions

that I wanted answered.

What did we know about the Jews?

What did we know?

Was there anything in the media which could have hinted at what was

rarely going on?

But you discovered that the knowledge wasn't there, that in fact there was a, it was a muzzle press obviously.

It was most definitely a muzzle press because we I remember when I heard the first

news after the end of the war about the British troops visiting concentration

...